It's often heard, usually by journalists being told why their profession sucks, that if a newspaper's coverage of [Insert Conversant's Specialist Subject Here] is anything to go by, then the whole paper is suspect. We'll address why in a few paragraphs, but I'll continue to extend the metaphor. If the world's political and business leaders' conversations about the web at the World Economic Forum are anything to go by, then they're not so much suspect as we are utterly doomed.

There's no buzzword more fashionable than Web 2.0, and nothing more likely to instil a sense of unease and panic in the old and powerful than letting the young and rich talk to them with words they don't understand. So the biggest draw last week wasn't Bono or Tony Blair, but Google's Larry'n'Sergey, YouTube's Chad Hurley, and the increasingly out of touch, but dammit he's got a lot of money, Bill Gates.

The way the Davos attendees treated the web - as both the most important thing in the world, and the most trivial toy they could safely ignore - was telling. Mostly it was fear. You guys, blessed blog readers, scare the Davos attendees silly. The entire conference had the air of panic of a sort that reminded me of Marie Antoinette frantically kneading dough. Openness, conversation, the worldwide electronic harmony of man - all were talked about in the way that comment threads here on Cif go when columnists get thoughtful about their place in the world.

If we don't open up, the organisation seemed to feel, we'll die of irrelevance. It wasn't just the meeting itself: Gordon Brown declared the end to "smoke-filled rooms", and speaker after speaker declared their allegiance to openness and the way of the wiki. The biggest round of applause I heard all week was not for Blair, but for Jimmy Wales, creator of the Wikipedia - which, given the audience, was applause more from fear than hearty thanks for a much-loved site.

But the continual harping on about openness was obviously nonsense. That a meeting of a couple of thousand of the world's richest and most powerful people might be something one could truly join, especially over the medium of comment threads, is either wishful thinking of the most surreal kind, or a cruel joke: a sop. Commenters on this site have said it themselves about the video answers to sent-in questions.

Still, all of this meant that the World Economic Forum gave some bloggers - Jeff Jarvis, Loic Le Meur, for example - greater access rights than the regular media. Bloggers with HD camcorders could wander anywhere in the building, while professional crews were restricted to the hallways and 30-minute bursts. Openness, it seems, is only for the amateur.

This drove many, including me, bonkers, so filter this through that point of view. But I wonder whether the original premise of giving bloggers access to Davos is true? After all you've read this past week, both here and on other blogs, do you feel that without the access that we could get this year the meeting would have been doomed to irrelevancy? Isn't this just technophobic hysteria? Or is there a value to closed-door dealings? An unexamined life may be not worth living, but does it really need to be on show all the time? What don't you want to know about? What don't you want to comment on? Come on, share ...